That's One Small Step for a Mag, One Giant Leap for Madkind

Hey! Slate finally addressed one of my complaints about their site!

If you look at the navigation sidebar along the left edge of any page, you should see an entry labeled "Disable Flyout." Click it, and voila -- no more need to fear moving your mouse when you're on that site.

Flyout menus, if you didn't already know, are menus on a web page that expand when you let your mouse hover over, or even cross, the menu name. All too many websites have them, and Slate's are particularly obnoxious -- the merest brush with the mouse pointer causes almost the entire screen to be filled with the flyout menu. Personally, 99% of the time menus fly out, that's not what I wanted. I'm almost always looking to click a different link or am enroute to the browser's toolbar itself.

So, good job, Slate. Ready for my next two three complaints about your site? Good. Here they are:

• Make your URLs meaningful. URLs are UI,^* to sightly misquote Jakob Nielsen. What good does slate.com/id/2186158/ do, for example? To your credit, you've implemented some redirect links, so that slate.com/gabfest gets me where I want to go, but in general, the URLs for your articles are nothing more than seven digit numbers. Compare, for example, a link to a specific story on the NYTimes's web site:
  
  nytimes.com/2008/03/29/science/29collider.html.
  
  There's a lot of helpful information there -- when the story was published, what section of the newspaper it belongs to, and a hint about the specific topic.
  
  Cripes, even my crummy blog gets this one right. Permalink for this post, for example:
  
  bjkeefe.blogspot.com/
    2008/03/thats-one-small-step-for-mag-one-giant.html
  
  Okay, so it makes for the occasional long line. That's what CTRL-c and CTRL-v were invented for.
  
  
• Build and/or improve individual pages for your writers and departments. Why is there no page at the address slate.com/hitchens? Why can't slate.com/hasbeen just take me to the top of the Has*Been blog, instead of presenting me with a minimalist calendar?
  
  
• Impose a ceiling on use of boldface, italics, and exclamation points for all Mickey Kaus articles. His thoughts are hard enough to read without the newbie typography.
  
  

Given that I've been griping about the flyout menus for at least five years, I'm not holding my breath. But it's the season for hope, right?

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^* The irony of the URL for Nielsen's article cannot be overstated.